- Reps Get 6000 Petitions from Academy
The House Committee on Maritime Safety, Education and Administration has received more than 6,000 petitions from the Maritime Academy of Nigeria (MAN), Oron, Akwa Ibom State. Besides, the Committee has issued a 30-day ultimatum to contractors handling projects at the academy to return to site.
During its oversight visit to the Academy, the Committee Chairman, Mohammed Umaru Bago, urged its management to pay outstanding debts and warned the contractors to return to site or have their contracts revoked.
Bago said: “I will encourage you to call all contractors of abandoned project for an interaction, pay all outstanding debts to contractors and ask them to return to site. Any contractor that refuses to return to site after 30 days will have his contracts revoked.
“Then, any work that is done without drawing, delegate your works department to get drawings on such jobs so that it can be maintained and refurbished, because some of the buildings that you have cannot be used.
“You don’t need to have thousands of buildings that are empty.
“On the issue of workers aiding some host communities to tap electricity power from the academy, any staff found to be doing such, please before you arrest such staff member, first sack him or her. Because when you sack such person, he is no longer a staff member, so you now arrest the person as a criminal.’’
Bago continued: “It is wrong to tap power from a generator that has just 100KVA capacity. Imagine a generator meant to service a building, some people in connivance with some of the Academy staff tap electric power from it to a village, how can such generator last long? This is wicked.
On ongoing projects, the lawmaker urged the Academy’s works officers to work hard on them. He said the architects should look at the designs of the projects while the engineers should look at engineering aspects of projects. Projects, he said, should not be left to contractors.
‘’It’s because people are not busy; that is why they have time for gossips. When I went to NIMASA, I told them that if I receive any petition from anybody, I will come to the agency and announce the name of the petitioner. The same thing will apply here. If anybody writes petition here, I will come and call the person to come and defend his or her petition.
“I have more than 6000 petitions from this academy alone on my desk. And most of the petitions are unfounded. I don’t have time for your petitions, people must change,” he added.
